Jan. 30, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:01:09
3192 America's Energy War: Fossil Fuels, Ethanol and Industrial Progress!
The energy industry is the industry that powers every other industry. Barack Obama's recent State of the Union speech reflected the political establishments opposition to many energy sources and a rejection of America’s Energy Opportunity.Alex Epstein joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the America’s Energy Opportunity project, misconceptions about fossil fuels, global warming propaganda, peak oil, ethanol, carbon emissions and the energy related political decisions which impact the survival of many in the world. America’s Energy Opportunity: http://www.americasenergyopportunity.comAlex Epstein is the President and Founder of the Center for Industrial Progress, the author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and an expert on energy and industrial policy. Center for Industrial Progress is a for-profit think-tank seeking to bring about a new industrial revolution. For more from Alex and CIP, please check out: industrialprogress.com and alexepstein.comTo purchase The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and get source notes, go to: moralcaseforfossilfuels.com or http://www.fdrurl.com/alex-epsteinFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio, back with Alex Epstein.
He is the president and founder of the Center for Industrial Progress, the author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, and currently auditioning a jacket that should be auditioning for Spandau Ballet.
Now, your t-shirt there, Alex, I Love Fossil, just tip up a little there.
We don't want people to think you're a Bernie Sanders supporter, so just, it's I Love Fossil Fuels, not just I Love Bernie Sanders.
So, thanks for taking the time, good to have you back.
Good to be here.
You know, nobody has suspected that I support Bernie Sanders.
I would imagine that's the case.
Now, the State of the Union speech that Obama gave recently, I guess it's his last big swan song, and the Republicans, a little bit, the Democrats, massively in their speeches have been talking about...
Climate change, the impending tsunami of waterlogged doom that is about to engulf the planet and other kinds of stuff.
It's the biggest single threat facing human beings these days, which I thought for Hillary Clinton would be the FBI. But again, it's just my particular perspective.
What are your thoughts on what the politicians have been exhaling over the masses these days?
Well, I think their words are definitely much more dangerous than the CO2 that's coming out of them.
I guess the context for, I mean, people are probably watching this somewhat familiar with at least your view on this.
But basically, CO2 is a byproduct of burning fossil fuels.
And burning fossil fuels is one of the single most constructive things.
That human beings do.
It provides 85 plus percent of the energy that all of our machines use in all of civilization.
And if we look at the impact of that byproduct, we find that it is completely manageable and really inconsequential in comparison to the benefits we derive.
So we should burn fossil fuels happily.
Now, our politicians have almost no regard for freedom, for capitalism, for human ingenuity, for technology, for industrial achievement.
And thus they have almost no regard for the achievement that is the modern fossil fuel industry.
They don't seem to think that it requires anything to maintain such an industry, certainly not freedom.
And unfortunately, therefore, all they focus on is the byproduct And then a bunch of doomsday predictions made about the byproduct, predictions that have been made for the last 35 years and have come completely false.
So it's very, very dangerous that they don't think anything about the risks of restricting fossil fuel freedom and only think about the benefits of restricting fossil fuel freedom, of which there are none.
Well, of course, for those not familiar with, I guess, what we could loosely call science, my sort of latest reading on some of the climate models, I did some modeling when I was younger.
No, I did some computer modeling when I was younger and as an entrepreneur.
And it is very much you can get out whatever you want.
And when you're talking about something as complex as climate...
Where they have, I think, north of 600 variables that they're all tweaking and where they can massage the raw data to get the effects that they want.
This is about as close to science as alchemy and prayer.
And so I just find that this idea that this modeling is somehow the same as science is kind of confusing.
What are your thoughts on the relationships between this computer modeling and what's actually coming down in the world?
Yeah, I mean, people interested in this should check out our last discussion of this, since I thought we raised some important points.
But briefly, I think two things.
One is that all the models should ultimately be judged by How accurate they are, but particularly how accurate they are in predicting impacts that are relevant to human beings.
So both of these are wrong.
A, the models predict nothing with accuracy.
So they predict warming developments much worse than just anyone using a dartboard would predict them, or anyone with common sense.
Because anyone with common sense would have said, hey, in the last 30 years, might get a little warmer, might not, probably won't be that much.
Guess what?
That's what happened.
But James Hansen predicted that between the years 2000 and 2010, it would get between 2 to 4 degrees warmer, which would have been more than the previous 150 years.
And instead, it got about 0 degrees warmer in that period.
So whatever – a model only works to the extent that you have very, very precise understanding of the different drivers of a certain phenomenon.
And obviously that doesn't happen.
And furthermore, even when people talk about temperature, hottest year ever, which means arguably in recorded history, you're talking about tiny percentages of a degree.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with human well-being.
Humans have never been as safe from the climate as we are today.
Now, there is an old saying from one of my favorite physicists, Dr.
Richard Feynman, sadly deceased, but he said that all science is based upon skepticism of those in authority.
And I really think that's, you know, we have to take empirical evidence, predictability, reproducibility, all that kind of stuff, as superior to any of the pronouncements of experts.
Science is often thought of as an aggregation of bodies Compose of scientists.
That is not science.
That is bureaucracy.
Science is not consensus.
If science were consensus, then of course we'd still think that the world was flat and sat on turtles forever.
Consensus could never be overturned.
Science is a very rigorous process of coming up with your hypotheses and testing them against the physical evidence.
And that is not what is going on in the climate world at the moment.
And the idea that You know, there'd be ideas floating about like maybe it should be a jailable offense to be a climate skeptic and maybe it should be classified as a mental illness.
I got to tell you that for me, the idea that one should not bring a heaping gallon of skepticism to people who claim to be able to predict the weather in a hundred years, I just don't see how that would...
I mean, of course we have to be skeptical and we do have to push back considering especially how many of society's precious and scarce resources are going into this scaremongering.
I think skepticism is not a sign I think it's important to look at the difference between how we look at what we can call skeptics or iconoclasts even in the past and how we look at them in the present.
Because in the past we think, oh, that guy was a revolutionary.
He challenged everyone.
Wasn't that good?
Aren't we glad that there was a Galileo?
But today, and back then, how are those things viewed?
It's viewed as, he's going against consensus.
That's bad.
How could everybody be wrong?
And the historic, and I would say scientific perspective, is to realize that mass delusion is a very common phenomenon among large populations and even among academic populations.
You have academic populations in the past supporting the eugenics movement, You have them supporting socialism in very large percentages.
So when people start talking about people agreeing versus evidence, you should be more than skeptical.
You should be contemptuous of that kind of methodology.
Look, hey, Bernie Sanders, if you want to cite something that's been proven, explain to me exactly what climate dynamics have been proven, and I would love to hear your proof.
I'm sure if you asked him, though, he would be like the head of the Sierra Club when Ted Cruz was grilling him on the floor of Congress, which is to say he'd have no idea and he'd turn back to ask his advisor, and all his advisor would have to say would be 97%.
And of course, if in my fantasy, in the future, children were taught logical fallacies, that would, of course, be the argument from authority and so on, which would have no validity, which is probably one of the main reasons why they don't teach it.
If they taught logical fallacies to children, I don't know what political speeches would be, hi, bye, because everything in between is kind of like a logical fallacy, and there would be no meat of nonsense in the sandwich.
Now, what's coming up at the moment, of course, everyone and their dog on the right is congregating in Iowa.
Iowa, well known for its bathroom off a hooker's butt sniffing off the ethanol subsidies.
And I wonder if you could get some of your thoughts on ethanol and its relationship to fossil fuels.
Because, you know, corn is a lot newer than coal, so that's better, right?
Yeah, no one ever made moonshine before in the past.
That's a very new kind of innovation.
I like thinking about energy issues the same way I think about any other issue.
So if there were some new cell phone development and there was an election in Iowa, okay, and Iowa happened to produce a lot of those kinds of cell phones, what would I think about it?
I'd think, well, if those cell phones are better, people should buy them.
And if they're not, they shouldn't.
But what the heck does that have to do with Iowa, the government, or the national election?
But of course, energy is completely politicized.
So there's this idea that we as citizens And voters should favor certain types of energy and scorn other types of energy.
And thus there's this argument in Iowa over favoritism.
Should we favor this moonshine slash corn ethanol or not?
And my view is no.
There should be no favoritism.
But there's this thing called the renewable fuel standard, which is...
Partially code for ethanol mandate, which requires us to use in our gas tanks, whether we want to or not, whether it makes technical and economic sense or not, to be forced to use this moonshine in our fuels.
And that's wrong.
And I went to an early Iowa discussion among all the different candidates, and this wealthy businessman brought them all there.
Of course, he could get them all there.
Why?
Because it's Iowa and it has this sort of ridiculously early political influence.
And he asked every candidate what they thought about ethanol.
And being free market Republicans, guess what?
They're all against it, right?
They're all against the ethanol mandate.
What would you bet?
Only one of them was that everyone else gave this stupid rationalization.
I won't even bother to repeat it.
But they were all basically saying, yes, we should favor ethanol.
And Ted Cruz, to his credit, whatever else he doesn't deserve credit for, said, look, I don't believe in subsidies for anything.
I don't believe it in Iowa, and I don't believe it anywhere else.
These guys are going to tell you one thing in Iowa and one thing everywhere else.
I'm going to tell you in Iowa that we shouldn't have ethanol subsidies.
We shouldn't have subsidies for anything.
You should compete on the free market.
And he got the largest applause out of everybody because it was one of the few things I've ever heard an honest politician say.
So on that one, I'm definitely with Cruz.
Yeah, I mean ethanol, for those outside of America or those outside the Beltway analysis, ethanol of course is a substance derived from corn that there's mandates in seven states, I think some 2%, some 10% or whatever, that you have to add it to gasoline and it reduces the mileage.
It's not even environmentally friendly because it reduces the mileage of cars.
It gums up combustion engines, thus perhaps causing premature engine death, which is, of course, really bad for the environment because you've got to get a whole new engine and dispose of the old one.
And, of course, the people in Iowa grow a lot of corn.
Iowa.
Idiots out wandering about?
I can't remember exactly what the acronym is.
Oh, come on.
But no, when it comes to subsidies, I mean, of course they need to back off from that kind of stuff.
I'm always skeptical of people who are avoiding the free market.
There's almost always some nefarious work at play when people are avoiding the free market and running to politicians to try and get their cash instead of appealing to people based upon, you know, you can get these benefits from ethanol.
And if that was the case, we wouldn't need the government to push it so hard.
Yeah, for sure.
Any time you see somebody saying in a political discussion, hey, isn't this technology great?
That's just a really weird kind of thing to do.
Because again, in any other technology, we just say, hey, look, I just found this great material to fill up my fuel tank with.
It didn't totally screw up the engine or anything.
And I got more mileage rather than less.
Whereas if you put in at least too much ethanol, a little bit of ethanol, It can be good to prevent certain things and up your octane, but they talk about 15% ethanol, more than that.
Basically, it attracts water, which is not what you want in a metal situation.
One of the amazing things about oil is that it doesn't attract water in the same way as ethanol does.
These technicalities are exactly why Bernie Sanders, Marco Rubio, any of these guys should have nothing to say whatsoever about what goes in our tanks.
They should have to say, hey, you're not allowed to sell exploding tanks to customers.
If you do that, you're in big trouble.
You're not allowed to lie about it.
But beyond that, I mean, stay out of the fuel tank.
You could have stay out of 100 different things that should be the motto of this election.
But on this one, just stay out of the fuel tank and we'll come up with intelligent solutions.
Well, and, you know, I don't know what Cruz said.
And, you know, props and praise to the guy for standing in front of a bunch of people receiving subsidies and telling them some basic facts.
You know, the case would be that you can either get a hard landing of subsidies ending or you can get a soft landing.
And I know Cruz originally put in this legislation that said we're going to just cut him off completely.
And then that failed.
He put in another legislation that says we're going to taper it off.
These subsidies are going to end.
You know, this is something that I think people don't like.
The subsidies are going to end one way or another because, you know, as America's sales passed $20 trillion in debt, it's just going to run out of cheddar to hand out to people for their votes.
The subsidies are going to end.
They're either going to end abruptly or they're going to be something that can be tapered off.
But, you know, this idea that it's going to go on forever...
It's a complete fantasy.
And I think, to Cruz's credit, he is telling people, not only is it morally wrong to use the government to force people to buy your products, but it's impractical because this subsidy has turned, I think, about 5 million acres of land that formerly were parked land or reserved land into land that is producing corn.
And what is going to happen when the Iowan farmers, who invested so much time, energy, and effort, and perhaps even exhausted their soil, which is why they have to expand so much, When the subsidy ends, as it's going to sooner or later, the longer it goes on, the harder it is for them to retool and the more bankruptcies they may face.
Yeah, they also need to get rid of all the farm subsidies.
If you want to talk about subsidies having an end point, those are a case against that, because those things just go on forever.
Now they're always renegotiating them.
But just what is wrong with leaving people free and letting them compete?
People have this idea that a sophisticated government is one that's constantly thinking of new ways to force you to do things.
Whereas a country that's actually sophisticated is one in which sophisticated individuals are free to make sophisticated decisions, including sophisticated difficult choices such as, maybe I should leave my farm because it's not the most efficient thing to do right now.
It's just amazing how having a basic understanding of the value of freedom Can solve all of these problems, but people think, oh, that's just too simple.
No, what the government does is simple.
What the government is doing is unleashing the ingenuity of everyone else to voluntarily solve all of these problems together.
Not that that's new to you, but it's so true, and nobody discusses it.
Well, I mean, we want fewer farmers.
I mean, that's just the reality.
Just as we want fewer people to mop floors, and we want fewer people as cashierers, because that liberates people to go and do something else.
Like, 100 years ago, 70% of Americans were involved in farming.
That number is now down to about 3%.
So, you know, 70 down to 3, that's 67% reduction.
But somehow, if you go down another percentage point, it's the end of the world, you know?
And that, I think, is what people don't understand.
We really desperately, to advance as a culture, to advance as an economy, people must be thrown out of work.
You know, it's very easy to get full employment, simply ban farm machinery and have everything picked by hand, or have a mandate that says everyone has to cut their lawn with Toenail clippers or something.
You can get full employment.
But the point is that we want people to have their jobs automated.
We want there to be fewer farmers.
We want there to be fewer of everyone in their current occupations so that we can all go and do new stuff, which is going to add more to the GDP. But of course, as farms begin to diminish, you know, farms and weather are two things, you know, based upon sort of agricultural past people are kind of hardwired to feel nervous about.
But yeah, we want there to be fewer farmers and the subsidies are preventing farmers from being liberated from automating and going off to do better things with their lives.
I think that those of us who have started our own ventures, who are any kind of entrepreneurs, I have a more intuitive perspective on this issue because if I think about my own business, especially when it was just me, any tool I could get my hands on that would take away X amount of my time and turn it into X divided by 4 was great.
So if I think of my brain as having parts and my time as having parts, I loved getting rid of those parts because then I could do more.
But that's the same with any individual.
If you can become twice as effective on a farm, that either means you can stay a farmer and be twice as effective, or you can do something else.
And with the equivalent kind of technology that would make you more effective there.
So ultimately everybody has to think of themselves as really entrepreneurs.
You're just figuring out what's the highest amount of value you can create.
And the idea of looking at a machine as your enemy versus your friend is exactly backward.
And when it comes to sort of world political stability, if we can get the sort of view from Mars of the geopolitical landscape, I'm really concerned that farm subsidies, of course, cause an overproduction of crops as one of the many distortions that they produce.
In France, of course, there are these famous lakes of wine and mountains of butter and all of the stuff that is basically just being thrown out.
But of course, a lot of this Food product is dumped on the third world, right?
I mean, it's too much for domestic consumption or people don't want it at the price.
It's shipped overseas and it's part of sort of foreign aid programs.
It's dumped into third world countries.
Now, of course, when you dump a free good into third world countries or any country for that matter, It displaces the people who are trying to produce for profit there.
So a lot of third world farmers have been unable to compete with all of this dumping of agricultural produce in their marketplaces.
This is one of the reasons why there's a mass migration from Mexico to America, partly for economic opportunity, partly of course because the war on drugs.
And partly because of this dumping of highly subsidized or free agricultural products on the local market destroys farmers.
You can't compete with free.
You can't sell a cabbage for a nickel if someone else is handing it out for free.
And these displaced people are causing a huge amount of political unrest.
And it's, I think, part of the migratory patterns around the world.
I mean, there's other reasons for it, of course, but these are the kind of ripple effects that can happen from subsidies that I don't think people can really trace Through to what's actually happening on the ground in third world countries.
Well, I still think the fundamental problem in those places is lack of freedom, because I mean, imagine that I, you know, we were guaranteed that, you know, some deity would just magically shower us all with food constantly, right, or some part of it.
Wait, are you back to the Bernie Sanders thing, or are we gonna, oh, supernatural!
Okay, got it.
Not ancient, but supernatural, got it.
I think Bernie Sanders makes many supernatural claims about his own kinds of abilities.
But yeah, whatever.
Gaia is just, you know, we find out, oh, it turns to the Garden of Eden tomorrow.
All the farmers go out of existence, right?
So everybody has free food.
Well, that's great.
We can all do more productive things.
We don't get quote-unquote displaced except to the extent that we're coerced.
But in these third world countries, you know, they have some semi-legitimate productive things that they at least know how to mimic or do for basic survival, like farming.
But they're in no position to start things like steel industries.
They just have no freedom like that.
So I think they're particularly victimized.
But I think the bottom line is that they're so coerced in the first place.
Because I don't think the free food would be that big.
Like, you want to shower me with free food?
Like, go for it.
I'll be fine.
Right.
Well, unless, of course, you're in the business of selling food and all of your customers are getting food for free, it's going to be a little tough for you.
Okay, fine.
But if somebody starts dispensing free energy philosophy, like, I'll go do something else.
More productivity, more goods...
Are generally a good thing.
I mean, assuming they were reliable, assuming they were healthy.
But in all of these cases, I mean, you're just having sort of one form of coercion mixed with another form of coercion.
And it's a mess.
And yet the individuals involved have all the capacity in the world to deal with these things if they're free, which includes being incentivized to do rational things.
All right.
So given that we're talking about B.S. Sorry, Bernie Sanders.
He has a quote here.
I'll get your response to it.
I won't imitate him.
It's too hard on my voice.
The debate is over.
The vast majority of the scientific community has spoken.
Climate change is real.
We will act boldly to move our energy systems away from fossil fuels and Alex's t-shirt, I think he mentioned that specifically, toward energy efficiency and sustainable energy sources like wind, solar and geothermal because we have a moral responsibility to leave our kids a planet that is healthy and habitable.
Q applause!
What's he missing there or what's he got extra that he shouldn't?
Well, that's a long discussion, but let's just look at the beginning of it and the end of it.
So at the end of it, he says, a planet that is habitable.
Well, sign me up for that, right?
I think everyone on this show right now at least wants a habitable planet.
But then he started with climate change is real.
So notice the disconnect between climate change is real and a habitable planet.
So his implication is, well, if climate change is real, then the planet must be becoming uninhabitable.
But that's not at all true.
That would have to do with who's causing it.
But primarily, what's the magnitude of it?
What's the magnitude and direction of it?
Is it this massive catastrophe that's growing and growing and growing and going to make our planet uninhabitable?
And that's precisely what there's no evidence whatsoever of.
And in fact, there's evidence of the opposite.
The evidence is that the more fossil fuel we use, The more energy we have, the more infrastructure we can build, the more habitable our planet is.
Nature doesn't give us a safe climate that we make dangerous.
It gives us a very dangerous climate that we make safe.
So this climate change is real is just a truism that's deliberately vague.
The whole issue is what's the magnitude of it?
And what's its relationship to human life?
And I'll relate this to one thing, because you mentioned State of the Union.
Barack Obama, what did he say?
I'm just going to look at my My Twitter on this because I was tweeting on this issue and Barack Obama said, quote, if anybody still wants to dispute the science around climate change.
And my response, he didn't actually respond to my tweet, believe it or not, is, hey, Barack Obama, in what scientific field are magnitudes not disputed?
All right, that's the whole thing.
It's constantly in science, you're disputing, hey, how big is this?
What's the function?
What's the equation?
What's the magnitude?
And what Bernie Sanders is trying to get away with is saying, hey, everyone can agree there's some magnitude of impact on climate by us, so we all must be able to agree with the catastrophic magnitude.
No.
Step back.
I don't agree with that at all.
There's no evidence of that.
So for him, you know, what's interesting, people might ask, why is it the statists are so attracted to this issue And that people on the free market side are more repelled by it.
Now, sometimes people say, well, it must be because everyone on the free market side has religious faith that God would never let this happen.
Well, I don't have any kind of faith in anything, so I just have evidence.
So that's not me.
And I know it's not you.
So, no.
So that doesn't work.
But what I do have is a very big appreciation of freedom and a fear of anybody coercing me in any way, particularly with regard to my energy.
Now, what you have on the statist side is not a history of doing wonderful things with science, exhibit, eugenics, Nazism, communism, what's the guy who starved all the Soviets with Stalin.
There's not exactly a good history there, so we don't have a pro-science and statism correlation at all.
What we do have is What we do have is a love of anything that will rationalize coercion against the individual.
And it's really powerful if science with a capital S justifies it.
So Bernie Sanders, who's never seen a free action he doesn't want to coerce, is in love with the idea that the fundamental thing every machine in civilization does, which is emit CO2, must be wrong and must be restrained by his holiness.
So that's what's behind it.
Well, and when all roads lead to Rome, you've got to question the objectivity of the road builders, right?
I mean, the reality is that every environmental disaster or potential disaster is used for an expansion Of state power.
And even if we accepted every conceivable premise of the climate change movement, that it's human caused, that it is catastrophic, that it is imminent, and that, you know, there's no, it's going to make the planet uninhabitable unless we somehow reduce our consumption or production or utilization of energy, even if we accepted all of that, None of that in any way, shape, or form would argue for increases in state power.
In fact, I've argued the opposite for many years.
Say, look, if you believe in catastrophic anthropogenic climate change disaster scenarios, then you have to get rid of central banking.
Because central banking borrows and prints money which massively increases Present consumption of resources and energy.
You know, America's $20 trillion debt, not to mention its $180 trillion unfunded liabilities, the $20 trillion in debt, which is, what, 16 or 17 months of America's entire GDP output, the $20 trillion in debt is $20 trillion Of present consumption that is going to have to be paid for by some form of lowered consumption in the future.
So if you care about the consumption of natural resources, the capacity for the government to create, borrow and print money is the ultimate disaster for the environment.
But I've not seen a single group outside of me say, well, you know, gosh, borrowing and printing money is a really bad thing because it accelerates our present consumption of resources.
So the best way to To solve climate change is to go back on the gold standard, which is an eminently defendable and rational position, but it's never that.
It's always, here's a disaster, the solution is more government.
And I think that's why people push back on the disasters, because it's always leading to the same place.
Well, I don't like going too far into these scenarios of, well, if you really care about the environment, this is what you would do.
Because I really care about the humans, and I believe the environment is a means to the humans.
So in terms of all of that spending, that's really bad.
But at least, in my view, we've gotten some industrial benefit from it in the present.
Now we have to pay for it in the future.
That's very unfortunate, and that's very sad.
I'm a humanist.
I don't judge anything from an environmentalist standpoint.
And even the climate issue, from the environmentalist perspective, the catastrophe is just if we change nature at all.
From a human perspective is if nature gets to be uninhabitable for us.
And what we've done has made nature much more habitable for us.
Score one for us doesn't justify the debt, doesn't justify central banking.
But I think from a human perspective, we're doing the right things.
You just need to be responsible with your long-term finances.
Now, given that I have a habit of gaining new listeners and then annoying them, I wonder if you could join me on a track down below.
peak oil.
According to the theories that I grew up with as a kid, you know, we were going to run out of oil and all be eating, you know, rocks and sand and each other by 1980s in England and so on.
The recent somewhat precipitous decline in oil prices would seem to push back a tad against the Obviously, this is something that's come up for you repeatedly in Q&A sessions and all that, but the people who talk about peak oil must be missing something, otherwise the price couldn't be going down as fast as it is.
What are they not understanding about our consumption of resources?
I think there's a couple fundamentals, some of which are sort of economically boring, some of which are a little bit interesting.
Nothing is boring about economics, man.
Nothing.
I love it.
My audience loves it.
Don't be afraid to be boring.
It's so standard that it's embarrassing how often it's not raised.
First of all, we have to dissect this idea of peak oil.
Peak oil, like almost any string of words uttered today, One is neologism that's very confusing.
These neologisms often package together multiple things.
In the case of peak oil, one is a prediction about future supplies of oil or our ability to produce future amounts of oil more precisely.
But then the other is the idea that this will be a crash if those supplies happen to be low enough.
And let's first address the idea of a crash, the idea of if a commodity has a certain supply level, it's fundamentally a problem and everyone's life will be ruined.
Because I think that's the thing that's economically boring, but very important.
And it's just you have to think of oil or oil products as like any other good.
They have a certain value to people.
People buy them because they're the best value for the price.
And if they go up high enough, what will they do?
They will choose to buy something else.
They will substitute.
This is just a standard thing.
Or reduce consumption wherever possible.
Substitute in the broadest sense of the world.
Have a substitute good or just not use it at all and do something else with the time And energy.
So this is just pretty standard thing of how prices work.
And so there's all of these, you know, you can read any econ book to see how prices work to quote unquote allocate scarce resources.
I don't love that terminology at all, but it captures the basic idea of there's a certain amount of oil that people can produce at a certain price.
If they can, you know, if that price goes up, if it becomes more costly to produce and or more people want it and are willing to bid up the price, then the price goes up.
And that's an incentive for other people to come compete or you to find other substitute uses.
It's just fairly simple.
So the idea is.
Well, and sorry, I just wanted to mention as well that the price is never a straight line.
Because when there's a jump in price, it means that you can spend more money extracting that resource and still make money.
So every time there's a jump in oil prices, the incentives for exploration are also ramped up, and that means that more oil comes on the market, then it goes down a bit, maybe then it runs out.
Even if we accept, it's going to be a sort of jagged line up.
There's going to be decades of price signals before there would be any kind of, it's no longer economical to use it.
Yeah, and I think the point you just made is, particularly the last sentence, is very important, that you have a certain long, the prices give you a long-range sense of what's to come.
But just imagine sort of the worst-case scenario, because recently we've experienced the best-case scenario, which is what you talked about, which is prices go up.
People have more incentive to explore.
They develop new technologies and you have this flood of oil on the market.
So suddenly we have so many oil reserves that we didn't have and it seems like magic.
Well, that's the price system in human ingenuity.
But even if that didn't happen, what would happen is then people would be investing more and more into substitutes.
Now, we mentioned ethanol before.
I was a little bit derogatory of its political manifestation in Iowa.
But that would be a perfectly legitimate type of avenue to explore.
For people to make it much, much cheaper.
Or you could use methanol, which is another form of alcohol fuel that you can derive from coal and natural gas, which are much more plentiful and cheaper to get than crops.
So what you would see, and you'd see sort of electric car developments as you do, but what you'd see is competition like in any other field.
There wouldn't be this cliff where we woke up one day and we went to the gas station and we thought, wait a second, there's no gas in here.
We all have gas cars.
What's going to happen?
It's all going to collapse.
Now, you could theoretically say, Nothing will ever be as good as oil was and will permanently have to pay a slightly higher energy price.
I doubt that, but you could hypothetically say that.
But this idea of a cliff is based on not understanding human ingenuity, not understanding how prices work.
So that's the boring point.
But nobody seems to understand basic supply and demand when they talk about oil.
The other point is a more interesting point, which has to do with the nature of resources.
And this is an Ayn Rand-Julian Simon point.
The way to think of it is this.
I'll often ask audiences, hey, can everyone agree with me that oil and gas are valuable natural resources?
And I'll have everyone raise their hands, and I'll say that, especially at oil companies, if I speak there.
And everyone will raise their hand.
And I'll say, okay, who disagrees with that?
And I'll raise my hand, and no one else will.
And I say, well, you're all wrong.
How can you say that?
Let me ask you this.
Was oil a valuable natural resource in 1850?
No, if you drilled and found it, it was disastrous.
Like, it's like, oh, what's this black sludge we can't do anything with?
What a mess.
Right, especially for people drilling for salt water, which is a lot of how they discovered different places where oil existed.
So you can say the same thing conceptually about natural gas, which was useless even when you drilled for oil.
It was mainly something that would kill you when you drilled for oil, so that was definitely not a resource.
Then there's aluminum, uranium, right?
Aluminum is one of the most abundant materials in the ground, yet it was useless until what?
Until we figured out how to transform the raw material into a resource.
So there's this distinction that Ayn Rand makes in the essay, Capitalism.
What is Capitalism?
At the beginning of Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal, where she distinguishes between the raw material and the usable resource.
And if you get that nature gives us unlimited raw materials, and that our capacity to make Usable resources is limited only by human ingenuity.
You think of the earth in a totally different way.
George Reisman, I think, described it as like a ball of potential resources.
And ever since I read that, I've thought of it that way.
And it transformed my thinking.
Now, in the context of oil, If you look at how oil exists underground, there's actually dozens of times more of it underground than we've used in the entire history of civilization.
But it exists mostly in forms that we have not figured out how to transform into resources.
What the recent shale revolution did Is unleash probably a couple trillion barrels that were previously useless.
And future revolutions, if they're necessary, if there aren't superior technologies, will do it as well.
So people think of it as the Earth, just Gaia just gave us this pool of, you know, perfect oil and we're sucking it out and it's almost half gone.
Versus, no, Gaia is full of this rock and sand, as you described it before.
And we've got huge amounts of it, and we use our human magic, basically, to turn it into this amazing fuel.
So if you get the idea of intelligence in prices and intelligence in resource creation, it gives you a totally different view of oil as, hey, this is the best way we have right now of creating this kind of energy.
It doesn't mean it will always be.
But as long as we're free to use our ingenuity, we'll come up with better and better stuff.
We won't be stuck eating rocks and sand.
Yeah.
The extraction of oil at a particular price point is limited by the existing technology.
When it starts to run out, the price point goes up.
And then what they did, as you know, is instead of drilling straight down, they now have these bizarre flexi-straw drills that can go round rocks and suck stuff out from underneath that they couldn't formally get.
And so this idea that resources are like a fridge full of food, there's no grocery store, you're not a farmer, so you're just going to run out and starve to death.
That's good.
I like that.
It doesn't help people understand that.
A fridge full of food.
Yeah, and you think about your own fridge full of food.
The resource behind that is your creative capacity to put food in the fridge in the first place.
So that's what you want to protect.
You don't want to be worried about peak fridge.
Now, of course, there is a scenario by which you could suddenly run out of oil, and we've seen some of it in, believe it or not, there's a helium shortage in the world, which matters more than just for my daughter's birthday parties, but apparently is used in a lot of medical treatments as well.
The scenario under which peak oil could conceivably occur is if government mandates low prices for oil long-term.
Like, way outside market range.
In other words, if the flexibility of supply and demand is not allowed to operate, government artificially keeps the price down, it'll stimulate overconsumption while at the same time holding back capital investment because you just can't invest enough to get the money out of it if the price is kept low.
And then there won't be any more innovations.
They'll suck up all the oil they can at a particular price point and then you might suddenly run out.
But that's nothing to do with the free market.
That's like peak economic mismanagement, which is just economic mismanagement.
That's very different from, I think, what people are thinking about in terms of some supply or demand thing.
Yeah, and more broadly, the government can make oil scarce immediately in many, many ways.
I mean, if we talk about the fossil Bernie Sanders, think about his different kinds of plans.
So if he wants to, let's say he wants to add a tax on CO2 that will drastically limit fossil fuel consumption.
Well, to do that, in my view, you'd have to add tens, dozens of dollars on every gallon of gasoline to seriously displace it.
I mean, for solar and wind, I mean, How are you getting from solar and wind to a car in an efficient way?
I mean, even electricity is super inefficient and unreliable.
But the idea of replacing autofuel with not being able to use coal, oil, or gas at any stage of the chain, who knows what the tax would have to be.
So let's say it's $100 a gallon.
These guys are never specific on what they want.
Let's say it's $100 a gallon.
Well, guess what?
That'll stop a lot of people from doing a lot of things really, really quickly.
Or just a standard cap and trade thing.
If you do a kind of 80%, we want to outlaw 80% of it.
Well, guess what?
People will have a lot less energy at their disposal.
So we don't want to be sanguine about the inevitability of having access to resources.
The phenomenon of having access to resources in plentiful quantities is completely a modern phenomenon of having free societies where intelligence can flourish.
Before that, they ran out of all kinds of resources constantly, in part because they didn't have freedom, which means they didn't have the science and technology to develop all the abilities, and they also didn't have the freedom to execute things.
They didn't have property rights.
And where we're going in our society, well, particularly with Sanders, and I would argue Trump in different ways, are the idea that the government should be dictating or have the power to dictate every aspect of our lives.
And we have to realize that is precarious.
So I'm not at all optimistic about resources as such.
I'm optimistic, I mean, I'm certain about resources under freedom.
Yeah.
So what is it about Trump's policies that are giving you pause?
We've certainly talked about that on the left.
What about those on the right?
I'll frame it in terms of the whole discussion of Trump and how people think about him, not just him himself.
There's this idea with the discussion of Trump that, well, what we as a country need is a really good businessman to run the country.
We need a leader.
Somebody who will be a winner and not a loser.
And these terms have some sort of congeniality to us from the business world.
But you have to think of what the business world is.
The business world is a world of free actors who are competing against one another, who cannot force you to do anything against your will, and who are making tiny, tiny, tiny decisions relative to the entire economy as a whole.
Even someone like Mark Zuckerberg.
It has a tiny, tiny, tiny amount of responsibility relative to the entire economy as a whole.
But if you're talking about government force, the last thing you want is somebody who has unlimited confidence in his or her ability to tell every individual in the country what to do.
In the discussions of not just Trump, but, oh, we need a businessman type, I have not once heard anyone talk about freedom.
Whereas if you're a real businessman, if you get that, if you get the kind of system that made you successful, you have to realize that your focus should be on liberating individuals and their ingenuity.
But I have not heard these politicians talk at all about individual ingenuity.
They talk about their personal ingenuity.
And that goes back to the issue of sophistication.
They think it's sophisticated to brainstorm with their little brain trusts of, you know, nine people and, hey, we have a lot of degrees.
Let's order 300 million people what to do.
Versus, no, 300 million individuals with brains, how can we unleash them and allow them to deal with each other voluntarily?
And guess what?
That's not actually that complicated.
So maybe all these guys want to be innovators, but we have a constitution, we have a declaration of independence, there are some good books on political theory.
You actually don't need that much more.
And I would like a presidential candidate to come and say, look, the essentials have already been figured out.
I have nothing novel to add, except that I will actually respect the constitution.
That's the only thing I can bring, I'm going to bring to the table.
That person will get my vote in a second.
Well, yeah, of course, the great cries from Ayn Rand, you know, get out of our way.
Get out of our way.
Let us interact with each other in a free and voluntary and open manner.
And that is something that is a challenge for a lot of politicians.
I do think with Donald Trump, and nobody can predict what anyone is going to do once they get that ring of power, you know, all the pretty speeches and all the good intentions, you know, I wouldn't even trust myself with that kind of power.
But I think one thing that does strike me as heartfelt from Donald Trump is, you know, people constantly criticize him for donating to Democrats and so on.
And the fact that he has for most of his career to get anything done in real estate, particularly in an urban setting in America, requires a lot of kneeling before politicos.
And I think the degree to which he has had to Kiss political rings in order to get anything done, has rankled against, you know, what is obviously a pretty proud and independent soul.
And I think that he is, and he openly says that he hates the system that forced him to have to give money to politicians.
And he's sort of, he's got this sort of Hank Reardon quality a little bit, insofar as, you know, Hank Reardon had a guy in Washington that he hated having to do it, but he had to do it in order to just be able to run his steel mill and so on.
I think that kind of heartfelt experience is driving him quite a bit and I also think if he can get anywhere with simplifying the tax code, he's not a pure flat tax guy, but in terms of simplifying the tax code enormously, I think that would be an enormous unleashing of productive potential.
People are scared of the tax code.
People who want to become entrepreneurs find it too complicated to manage and make it happen.
Simply having to hire an accountant to get through the day is creating a lot of barriers to entry.
And I think if people don't have this shadow of this omnipotent, omnipresent, virtually omniscient IRS looking over their shoulder every day, plus the billions of hours it takes to complete the paperwork and so on, I think if he can do that aspect of things, minimize the need for people to pay off politicians or give politicians money in order to get something done, as well as simplifying the tax code, those are some pluses.
Some of the minuses around a tariff war with China and his ambitious overseas kill missions, I have some concerns with.
But as far as the economy goes domestically, I can see how some of his experiences and some of what he said might translate into getting out of some people's way.
Let me say one thing about Trump, because there's always this question of why is he so successful?
Why is he so popular?
Why do all the other people look so awkward in relation to him?
And there are a lot of aspects of that, but I think the aspect that's easily overlooked but crucial Is his whole campaign slogan, which is, Make America Great Again.
And from the beginning of his whole campaign, he has had that slogan.
And he's known that for any movement, you need a positive theme.
You need a cause to stand for.
And if you ask yourself, what's the campaign slogan of anyone else?
Maybe Sanders has one, I don't know.
But none of the others do.
You know, Jeb is just Jeb with an exclamation point.
Well, that's so he can avoid the last name Bush, which is a bit of a millstone these days.
So my own appeal then to Trump and Trump supporters is as excited as you are about Make America Great Again, which I think is a mixture of good things in that we need to be free and more prosperous, but also bad things, this idea that we need to beat everybody.
I don't think that's how we should think of ourselves relative to other nations.
But if you really want to make America great again, This issue of energy is the ultimate opportunity, because energy is the industry that powers every other industry.
We're at a technological point now, particularly with oil and gas, where we can become the world's energy superpower for decades, which means that every aspect of human wellbeing gets improved.
From having a better environment, to having more jobs, but truly productive jobs, to even dealing with some of the deficit issues, to increasing our industrial abilities, having more factories, that kind of thing.
Every one of these issues ties to energy abundance.
So to put in a plug for something free, I hope people go to AmericasEnergyOpportunity.com and just sign.
I have a note to politicians that basically says, Uh, seize this energy opportunity or we're not voting for you.
Cause I'm really frustrated watching these stupid debates and they just talk about everybody, you know, Trump's tweets and Clinton's emails.
And we've got this amazing opportunity before us that can help address all of these problems.
And yet nobody's talking about it.
So America's energy opportunity.com.
This'll go directly to the politicians and tell them, look, this issue matters.
Start talking about real things and hey, Trump's competitors, free political consulting.
Why not make this your issue?
Why not stand for something instead of, you know, being like Jeb Bush and spending, you know, 18 hours prepping for responding to Trump?
Of the candidates that you've seen, as far as energy goes, I mean, I would assume that you're probably a little closer to where the Republican candidates are.
Of course, I could be wrong on that.
If you had to choose a candidate whose energy policy you would most fully support, who would it be?
Again, if you don't want to answer, that's totally fine.
It's a personal question.
I'm just curious.
The reason I'm not answering yet is because I myself am trying to get people to buy on to America's energy opportunity.
So the candidate whose policy I support will be the one who embraces it, who actually embraces it.
So if Bernie Sanders wants to make a big shift, And get rid of the whole socialism thing.
I don't know where that would leave him.
But in all seriousness, it's not a partisan issue.
I don't think it should be a partisan issue in people's minds.
It's a human life issue.
Your ability to have cheap, plentiful, reliable energy and for billions of other people to have it.
Those are non-negotiable fundamentals of human life.
We have a country that in the last several years, despite the policies of the administration, has become amazingly good at producing that, and yet we still are making it super hard.
How hard is it to build a pipeline?
How hard is it to start a mine?
How hard is it to drill?
How hard is it to frack?
How hard is it to sell your product overseas to create a new factory?
All of these things should not be hard.
In a free society with property rights, people should be free to do them.
They should be able to do them now and they should be confident that they'll be able to do them in the future.
So seizing an energy opportunity is all about freedom.
To come back to one of the themes of this call, Freedom is the solution to all of these problems.
If you like, that's the silver bullet.
It's proven.
I mean, I had this rant about Mark Zuckerberg that I wrote on Facebook because he's writing about, oh, here's how I'm going to give $45 billion, blah, blah, blah, and all these things.
And I said, you know, I didn't see the word freedom at one time in your document, and yet we have a time-tested way of solving all the problems you claim to care about.
So it's actually really easy if you're a billionaire to give away billions of dollars.
It's not hard.
It's not that hard because you don't think you need them.
What's really hard is to support something controversial, and that means freedom in a meaningful sense, which means liberating individuals around the world from statist oppression and including individuals in our part of the world from statist oppression.
And I think people need to learn to trust the price system.
I remember dozens of years ago when in Canada they started to mandate.
I can't remember exactly when they did.
It was a big debate for quite some time about whether recycling should be mandated by the government or not.
And I remember even dozens of years ago basically saying to people, because people were like, well, of course you have to recycle and so on.
And I said, but the price system will tell you.
If people will pay to come and pick up your recycling, that means that they've found a way to make it economically efficient.
And if you have to force people to come and pick up your recycling, it's because nobody can figure out how to recycle things using less resources than building something new.
So if people can just trust the price system, the price system is the ultimate, quote, regulatory mechanism.
It's dynamic and it's flexible and, of course, it's constantly updating based upon new opportunities.
It promotes ingenuity.
It works around things.
It is something that if people learn how to trust it, then they won't feel the need to have basically guys with guns intervene to voluntary transactions and force people to do stuff.
If you rely on the price system, the price system is the greatest free calculation of human needs, once available resources, preferences, denials, deferments, uses in the present.
It is the greatest We're good to go.
Is contained in a bid and an offer in price.
They think they could really understand how you really don't need and in fact can't have a centralized agency forcing and hurting all of these resources around at gunpoint.
All you need is to trust the price system and the information it contains.
Yeah, and the price system isn't something that we're advocating that's sort of on top of freedom or something.
We're saying, hey, rely on this.
It's just a complete outgrowth.
It's just a means of people communicating their productive abilities and consumptive abilities and desires to one another.
It's just unbelievable what kind of product you get in the realm of communication when people are free.
But just as we get unbelievable technological products, When people are free, so information about what people want and how to produce it, it's no wonder that when people are left free you get these amazing systems, but we haven't been taught to appreciate it.
I just wish that I don't know, that it wasn't seen as we're imbeciles and we need one really bright person to figure this out.
And we all kind of have a sense those guys are imbeciles.
And then we think, oh, well, if he went to Harvard, then we should feel safe versus just realizing that we have the whole thing totally wrong.
I mean, what if...
If you work in a business, any business, let's just say 30 people, take any of these guys.
Now, you might think with Trump, so I'll leave aside Trump.
But you say, I want this guy to come to my business, and he just gets to order us to do whatever he wants.
You'd probably think, well, I'm not so sure Bernie Sanders would do the best thing.
I'm not sure he would even know how to run a 7-Eleven.
Somehow they're gonna run 300 million people.
So it's just, you have to appreciate your own mind and the contribution these people give to your lives is they're policemen, they're a bodyguard.
That's what they should be good at.
I can actually, I do know how Bernie Sanders would run a 7-Eleven.
Not many people have this knowledge in the world, but I do.
And what he would do is photocopy money, hand it to people coming in the store, have them spend that money for real goods in his store, and then think he's making a fortune.
That's my particular guess, but I could be wrong.
Okay, one last little rant I'm going to make and then I'll get your closing thoughts on this, whether it's nonsense or not.
The Islamic countries, boy, I mean, it's...
It's a good way to begin a sentence, by the way.
Yeah, the Islamic countries, to me, like complete nightmares as far as anybody who's into empiricism, atheism, rationality, free speech, gender equality, like all the things that the remnants of which make life worth living in the West, not so much over there.
And one of the things that I've thought of for quite some time is the degree to which...
The environmentalists who wish to keep the West pristine, what they're doing is tilting the table so that massive amounts of money go into theocracies.
And that's not good for anyone, anywhere, except maybe a few people in white robes at the top of these theocracies.
So I really wanted to get your thoughts or maybe just get this out to your listeners and mine, just this basic reality that if you are going to restrict the Energy exploration, energy consumption here in the West, what you're doing is normally dictatorships don't make a lot of money, which is why the Soviet Union failed, which is why North Korea is currently failing, which is why Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge failed, and Mao's China failed, and so on.
normally, you know, centrally planned, centrally organized, particularly theocracies, and of course, communism is a brand of theocracy, they tend to do economically really badly, they fail, and then free market reforms are often implemented.
And the degree to which we say, well, we can't drill in Alaska, and we can't have fracking, and we don't want shale exploration, well, people need to consume energy in order to live.
And unless you're willing to have like an 80 or 90% reduction in the number of human beings on the planet, you're going to have to have a lot of energy consumption.
The degree to which that is blocked in the West is the degree to which you're simply fueling and funding some of these theocracies over there in the Middle East.
And And it is a net negative in many ways for human society as a whole.
So that's your choice.
Allow free energy exploration here or slide more and more money to prop up These tottering theocracies in other countries.
And I think when people see that kind of big picture perspective, these theocracies are going to have to fail if any kind of free market or gender equality or freedom of speech reforms are ever going to take their place.
And the only way to starve them of resources is to allow more domestic exploration and consumption of energy at the home.
That's the end of the rant.
And I just wanted to know if you think that's complete nonsense or what your thoughts are on it.
I partially disagree with that.
I substantially disagree with that, at least as an emphasis.
I'll tell you what I agree with about it, which is that with these countries, insofar as you deliberately gut your ability to produce energy, You radically reduce your energy security.
And that becomes more and more important internationally the more hostility you have from other countries.
So if you have Russia on the market, particularly with their stranglehold in many ways on Europe in terms of gas, And then you have many of the Mideast theocracies being leading producers of oil, and Venezuela being a leading producer of oil.
And then your whole policy consists of, okay, no Keystone Pipeline, no American oil drilling.
What do you do?
You leave this vital product at the mercy, not of your friends whom you would Freely trade with other commodities and not be worried about, but with enemies or with near enemies.
And with something like oil, we talked about restricting oil before.
Yeah, you can have a big shortage of oil caused by these irrational policies because then you put yourself at the mercy of the other nations and they can put pressure on you.
And we've seen this with the Middle East already.
Look at how much, you know, they get called your holiness and stuff.
And, you know, these different sheiks come over and they get, you know, President Bush would invite the head of Saudi Arabia to his ranch for chicken and biscuits and this kind of thing.
And you see, obviously, this is not happening with random poor countries in Africa that don't wish us one one hundredth the harm, that aren't, you know, spending a hundred billion dollars on Wahhabism You know, training terrorists and this kind of thing.
So that lack of energy security has at least partially motivated — it's harmful on its own terms and it's partially motivated being way too friendly with these countries.
But the fundamental, I think, in terms of foreign policy is that you can't run a foreign policy by primarily trying to just restrict the resources of your enemies.
Now, what you can do is refuse to prop them up, as we should have not propped up the Soviet Union for decades.
You should absolutely not prop them up.
And historically, we have propped up the Arab and Muslim nations by letting them steal, and I use that word deliberately, the oil.
That is, we had specific contracts that were based on real wealth creation.
That were created by American and British companies.
And they completely stole the oil.
We let them get away with it.
And guess what?
The people who stole the oil weren't very good people.
And them becoming immediately enriched by something they did nothing to earn was not good for their moral character.
Shocker.
And to keep their goodwill, hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons have been sold, which they use to oppress their own people to a large degree.
Yeah, so the whole history of this, I've talked about this before, is a mess.
But the fundamental is this.
A foreign policy should be based on the self-interest of the United States.
Now, how to execute that is a big controversial topic, but the principle is it should be our self-interest, which means not our glory in the world, not making the world safe for democracy, but the actual lives and freedom of American citizens.
And that means including when we make deals, when our oil industry makes deals in Saudi Arabia that before us the whole national treasury could fit on the back of a camel, literally true.
Our government protects those individuals.
If we're going to have individuals, if we're going to endorse the contracts, we protect them.
If somebody attacks us, we protect ourselves.
So you just have to have this fundamental of we have to deal with this problem.
And when Donald Trump said in this very vague way about this policy about, oh, no Muslims in the country, it's just the wrong way of approaching it.
But he said, look, we've got a really big problem.
We need to think about it.
I agree with that.
We actually need to think about the nature of the problem and what it takes to solve it.
And I think blaming oil, which a lot of people do, is an easy shortcut because blaming oil is something we're already comfortable doing.
But talking about the nature of certain cultures around the world, talking about certain groups, We're good to go.
Ruin ourselves without more energy and this in many other respects, but we also need a real foreign policy that's based on thinking about the things carefully from the perspective of American freedom.
Well, I'm not going to try and rebut that.
It was a great case and just wanted to say thanks a lot for your time as always.
Moralcaseforfossilfuels.com.
You really look at that.
Look at that.
It's beautiful.
And it actually comes with half a gallon of oil squished in between the pages, which you can use for brill cream.
I didn't use very much.
And remember, the President and Founders Center for Industrial Progress, also available for speeches.
What did you do, 10 last week?
I did 10 last week, yes.
10 last week.
So a great speaker, somebody who's going to be in command of the audience and arrives in a suit made entirely of petroleum, which really shouldn't be missed.
